


What's so wrong with the light?

by birdafterdark



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Speculative Fiction, Androids, Convent Husbands, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Fix-It, Future, Gardens & Gardening, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kaleidoscopes, M/M, Melon Hats, Multi, Near Death Experiences, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Referenced euthanasia, Robots, Solarpunk, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26560042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdafterdark/pseuds/birdafterdark
Summary: In a future ravaged by climate change and societal collapse, many pockets of human society have moved underground, but some brave and desperate souls find themselves making lives on the Surface for a variety of reasons.There is some darkness here, as evidenced in the tags, but it is ultimately a fix-it for both "Les Misérables" and "Frankenstein."
Relationships: Père Fauchelevent & Javert & Jean Valjean, Père Fauchelevent/Javert/Jean Valjean, Père Fauchelevent/Jean Valjean
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8
Collections: Sewerchat Anniversary Exchange 2020





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Helianthusannuus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helianthusannuus/gifts).



> I'm an awful person and realized this fic grew beyond what I originally planned, so it is not yet complete. However!!! I swear that it will be complete soon; I plan to finish it before authors are revealed. It's all plotted out and everything -- I just need to get it out of my brain and onto paper. (Or, well, onto the digital equivalent of paper.)

She stands, gazing upward, a soft breeze tickling the hairs on her arm and making the balloons dance. In that moment, she realizes that she has been lied to her entire life. The sky is not blue.

  
~~~

Cosette’s earliest memories are of color and chaos. 

When she was very small, her mother gave her a strange toy. It was a fading cardboard tube covered in ancient-looking Surface cartoons: stylized, bipedal mice; clowns with bright, almost frightening faces; little patterns of stars. The tube was closed off at either end. She flipped it over a few times, shook it, and banged it on the table a bit before her mother gently took her arm and showed her how to hold the clear plastic end up to her eye. She’d only been able to see a murky darkness until she learned to point the tube at a lamp or a candle flame. When she did, the world inside the tube flickered to life: innumerable colors that slid around and changed patterns whenever she moved the tube. 

Her mom said the tube was called a “kaleidoscope.” 

She’d had trouble saying the word, at first, but she loved the sound and would whisper it to herself until she got it right: kah-lee-dough-scope. Kuh-lie-duh-scope.

They took it from her later, of course. But in the worst moments, she could close her eyes and remember the shimmying patterns.


	2. Winter

It has been many years, but it still comes to him every night.

There is always a moment just before the accident when he knows what is coming, when the breath catches in his chest and he stands frozen, just staring up at the elevated tracks as the cart begins to tip. He wants to move his legs, but they remain rooted to the spot, like the trees he’s read about in storybooks — tall, majestic things that were as unmovable as stone, yet alive. Terror floods him as he tries desperately to make his muscles respond. Paralyzed, he tries to scream, but that also does not work: it is not just his legs that are frozen, but his entire body, so that the muscles needed to draw breath and move his mouth are as stiff as any other, and all he can do is panic internally. It feels like hundreds of tiny creatures pounding the inside of his skull, demanding release.

When the cart does fall, it’s like watching a video in slow motion and then, abruptly, fast-forward. It is almost beautiful, giant chunks of aquamarine rock held inside the cart by a layer of wire mesh, the copper veins glowing a deep orange-red in the dim light, like fire trapped in the sea, and then it is upon him and the next thing he knows he has crumpled. He feels his leg snap. The pain is so intense that it fades away, as though his nervous system has been overwhelmed and simply crashed. He is struggling for air, like he’s underwater and desperately swimming toward a light, but the light keeps receding, and he can hear the distant murmurs of townsfolk gathering around him.

“It’s Fauchelevent.”

“The cart tipped, it fell —”

“—no helping him, no way we could lift those rocks, there aren’t enough of us —”

“— he’s probably a goner anyhow —”

“— couldn’t have kept at it much longer, he was getting so frail —”

“— he was bound to be sent Above soon, perhaps it’s kinder this way —”

 _You’re wrong! You’re all wrong! I have life in me yet! I’m strong enough to keep laboring for years!_ , he wants to yell, even as he feels his life slipping away.

* * *

Sometimes that’s where the dream ends and Fauchelevent wakes up with a gasp.

Sometimes, as in reality, it doesn’t end there. Those nights are the best and the worst, because a warm, russet-toned voice cuts through the bystanders’ excuses. Normally unrushed, it is now tinged with urgency.

“Isn’t anyone going to help him?”

The voice sends a wave of repulsion through Fauchelevent. Everything is reaching his ears a bit garbled, and before he is able to piece together the meaning of the words, he knows who has spoken them: That damned do-gooder mayor. Madeleine had sauntered into town a few years ago, answering with only a vague hand wave when asked about his past, and approached the Copper Barons with a lucrative trade proposal. Copper sales boomed and suddenly the weak-minded townspeople flocked after Madeleine like ducklings, seeking his advice and practically worshiping the taciturn old man as he went about his daily activities. The mysterious stranger had risen to a place of prominence at the same time Fauchelevent, a scribe who had given so many years of service to his hometown, had been demoted to a glorified messenger boy. Soon Madeleine was appointed mayor, despite his radical socialist notions and pie-in-the-sky ideas.

Fauchelevent’s dislike of Madeleine is so intense that it takes him several moments to process that the mayor is currently applying those socialist notions to a speech in favor of saving Fauchelevent’s life. And … not _just_ socialist notions, but capitalist ones, too: When his rousing speech about helping your neighbor is met only with awkward silence, Madeleine offers a tidy sum of golden sols to anyone willing to step in.

Finally, a single voice answers, deep and devoid of feeling.

“Forgive me, sir, but all the empathy and coin in the world will amount to nothing if the people here are not physically up to the task. And as there are two metal boulders on his person and only a handful of people here, none of whom are particularly suited to physical labor, trying to help the old man only risks injuring more people. I have sent someone into the Depths to request a jack and the assistance of a few of the stronger laborers.”

“The Depths! Javert, look at him. He doesn’t have much time.”

“We are doing what we can.” 

There is a moment of silence, then the sound of rustling and footsteps and a susurration from the direction of the onlookers. Fauchelevent’s energy is fading, and he can no longer seem to open his eyes, but he knows from the sudden movement of air and a faint smell of peppermint that Madeleine is kneeling near him. He wants to focus on what’s happening, he wants to fight to stay alive, but his senses are becoming a murky phantasmagoria …

* * *

  
Fauchelevent becomes aware that a strange sort of whimpering sound is escaping his lips. He stifles it, embarrassed, but it takes a moment before he realizes that the pressure has been lifted from his chest — that, in fact, he’s alone, shaking under a thin wool blanket, his back not pressed against cold stone but cushioned by a moss bedroll. Beads of sweat are clinging to his neck and his heart is racing. Cautiously, he opens his eyes.

Seven years since he’s left the Subterrane and he’s still not used to the way the sunlight wakes him up, warming his face and scattering rays of gold throughout the room.

Seven years since he’s left the Subterrane and he’s still having these dreams.

Fauchelevent rolls onto his back and stares upward. Light is filtering in through the ceiling, casting tremulous ovals of green and blue and brownish-yellow across the room. “Stained glass” would be too self-congratulatory a term for his artistic endeavors; his ceiling in no way resembles the magnificent story-telling windows of old chapels or the Art Nouveau lampshades of Tiffany. Nevertheless, Fauchelevent is proud of the roof he and Henry had installed last spring, wiping sweat from their brows with old bandannas and working only at dawn and dusk to conserve the drinking water. They’d spent weeks gathering the weather-beaten, irregularly-shaped stuff the desert turned up: bits of old bottles or old traffic lights and tail lights, which weren’t even glass at all.

He goes to the kitchen to put on the kettle, scooping out some dried yaupon leaves into a small, rusted metal tea ball, which he leaves sitting in his chipped mug. Then, as Fauchelevent does every morning, he pulls open his wooden door and stands on the porch, stretching his limbs and staring out at the sky. 

Henry is already up, sitting on his hammock chair and peering at Fauchelevent from over his own cup of tea. “You’re up later than usual, father,” the kid says, raising an eyebrow. 

Fauchelevent likes Henry, who took to calling him father almost as soon as the old man arrived at the Luxium complex. Other people whispered about him — targeting him for his poetry, his long lashes, the flowers he sometimes tucked behind an ear or braided into his shoulder-length blond hair. Some people pretended to be worried that he was a freeloader, contributing “nothing of use” and ambling around like he was in a daydream. But the more honest gossips worked words like “effeminate” into their poisoned words, and men would cringe and flinch away if Henry touched them, as if his softness was contagious. 

None of that bothers Fauchelevent. And, besides, he likes Henry’s writing. Although he was never a poet himself, Fauchelevent likes words; he earned his living as a scribe in the Subterrane before people became suspicious of written language. The scribes who replaced him were fluent in the new ways of recording information, strings of pictorial images Fauchelevent could sometimes barely decipher, and he was reduced walking from place to place as a courier. Even when the message was simple enough for him to make out, Fauchelevent couldn’t help feeling that something ineffable was lost when “I would love to meet up for coffee! What time is good for you?” became “👱🏻‍♀️☕️👩🏾‍⚖️💯❗️⏱❓”

“I slept well,” he lies now, finishing up his morning exercises. Henry undoubtedly knows it is a lie, but he accepts it with a gentle kick of his foot, setting the chair swinging gently. 

Soon Fauchelevent joins him, and they both sip tea in the shade of the awning, gazing out at the greenhouses and hydroponics buildings and desert shrubs and, in the distance, the Wall, stretching upwards like some sort of ancient castle fortification. 

Most of the population prefers to live in the apartment units cut into the hillside behind them, which allow for more communal living and boast a better view from their balconies — both a pleasant amenity and, at times, a practicality, because The Eaters and storm systems and any other threat can be spotted and dealt with sooner. But Fauchelevent chose one of small, separate units built into the bottom of the hill so he could be closer to his plants. His home has one door facing outward and some room for skylights in the roof, but it is still largely underground. He doesn’t mind; the forward-facing windows provide enough sunlight for him, and he spends as much time as feasible outdoors, anyway. It’s far from the gloom of the Subterrane, miles below the earth’s surface. 

“I better check on my babies soon,” Fauchelevent murmurs. “Before it gets too hot.” 

* * * 

Soon he and Henry, clad in their wide-brim straw hats, are making their way to the melon fields. In a satchel slung over his shoulder, Fauchelevent has the notebook in which he keeps his gardening logs and several sheets of newsprint and colored paper, which Luxium resident use to circulate newsletters and pin messages to the notice board.

“I still don’t understand why you don’t just stick with hydroponics,” Henry says as they reach the melon plots. Fauchelevent pauses for a moment to admire his handiwork: several raised beds covered in straw and a carpet of green leafy vines. The fruit is still a smooth green ball only the size of his fist.

Fauchelevent kneels and sticks a finger in the soil, which he decides is still moist enough to forgo watering for the day. “I spent most of my life locked away from the sun. Life needs light. Plants deserve it and crave it as much as humans, maybe more.” 

The two men move in what is a now mindless routine: Fauchelevent trimming back the vines and Henry inspecting the base of the plants for curled-up cutworms. Every now and then one of them crushes a cucumber beetle between his fingers.

“I know they say it’s too hot to grow much outside,” Fauchelevent continues, “but I have to try. I still have plenty of food in the hydroponics chambers; it’s not like we’ll starve if this crop fails. But I’m sure I can find a way to make this work. It seems only natural that a plant should grow in the sun.” 

Henry frequently teases him for his meticulousness — Fauchelevent keeps detailed tables of data about his melons, growing a handful in the hydroponics room as normal and slightly altering the pH and water content of the soil in each of the outdoor melon beds. But he also gets the sense that Henry respects his determination to grow melons outdoors — if not in a logical sense, at least in some ineffable poetic way.

After the daily maintenance and logging, the two men sit in the dirt next to the melon beds, folding the paper Fauchelevent collected into little conical hats for the growing melons. The shade should help protect the fruit from the sun while not blocking it out entirely. Fauchelevent is the one who comes up with the idea to name each melon and scrawl the name on its hat. He calls them his children, after all, and children deserve unique names and individual attention. 

They have fun at first, throwing out whatever names float to their mind, from the mundane (”Bob,” “Mary,” “Sue,” “John”) to the classical (”Orpheus,” “Jupiter”) to the evocative and exotic (”Halcyon,” “Phoenix,” “Liberty”). But the mood turns more serious when Henry writes VICTOR across one of the little hats and gently sets it atop particularly plump young melon.

“Have you … have you had any luck on that front?” Fauchelevent asks tentatively. 

Most people living at Luxium are refugees from the Subterrane, some cast out for crime or sickness or age, some who decided themselves to see what was Above. Most Subterraneans believe the Sun and Surface equal death, and they aren’t entirely wrong: The Surface means oppressive heat, even in what used to be the winter, and extreme drought punctuated by raging storms. But Fauchelevent had never expected there to be something like Luxium above; he, like most others, thought Surfacing would mean either wandering the desert until one collapsed from dehydration and weariness, or being attacked by one of the criminal gangs that roved the world, or being ripped apart by the Eaters. Thus, most people who chose to come above were suicidal. A handful of conspiracy theorists and ardent explorers also made their way to the surface, cursed as they were with an overabundance of boldness and curiosity. 

Fauchelevent himself had only come at Madeleine’s urging. After the accident, the mayor was frequently at his bedside, something which marveled and alarmed Fauchelevent. Visiting the clinics was considered such a taboo the one might be sent to the Surface or otherwise punished for the act alone, yet Madeleine was always there. Madeleine and the nurse, Fantine, had assured Fauchelevent that there was place Above where he could live, where he could even be useful, where he wouldn’t be disposed of for what was sure to be a significant limp. 

Henry, though … Henry was not from the Subterrane. Fauchelevent doesn’t know exactly where the man came from, but he knows that Henry has seen significantly more of the surface than anyone he’s ever met. He’s been using the Luxium as a home base for several years and takes frequent trips into the wilderness, risking everything to look for someone named Victor. A friend, he says; a lover, according to the gossips. 

Henry only sighs, then, and gazes at the melon with his dark eyes. Fauchelevent makes two more hats to adorn his favorite melons, naming them MADELEINE and FANTINE, and then the men walk together to Henry’s flower fields. A silence hangs between them, full of things unsaid and yet mutually understood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've done too much research for this fic. Please ask me your questions about growing melons in the post-apocalypse. 
> 
> I may make some sketches of the architecture of Luxium, if anyone is interested in visuals. 
> 
> I also did a sketch of Victor the Melon but it looks .... bad.


	3. Spring

The town of Abyssal Overlook is asleep. The Copper Barons are tucked into beds piled with the finest silk blankets, the simplest laborers toss and turn on moss and stone, and even the nurses are taking their prescribed rests in the rows of cots in the back of the clinic. 

The mayor, however, is perched cross-legged on a boulder, gazing trancelike into his fire. 

He is, he admits to himself, entangled in a web of his own making. The decision he makes tonight will determine not just his destiny, but that of many individuals he’s managed to draw into his complex system of lies and half-truths and crimes over the past several years. 

Jean Valjean used to believe he was acting in the interest of the greater good. Every decision he has made since the Bishop sent him forth with a sackful of copper candlesticks and cutlery has been carefully weighed; he always asks himself what Myriel would do in his situation. He continually reminds himself about the importance of mercy.

 _Well_ , he realizes, _that’s not quite true. There was the incident with Petit Gervais._

Every decision since he stole a half-sol from a child, then.

But he must have done something wrong. Made the wrong decision, overlooked something, unable to truly repress his criminal nature. Because now he is here, before his fire, in a quandary, and considering running again. 

* * * 

Theft is punished severely in the Subterrane. Resources are limited, after all, and you are compensated by a share of them proportionate to your usefulness to the town’s Barons. If you want more, find a way to be more useful. If you’re finding it hard to support your family, you shouldn’t have had such a big family. Don’t be greedy: We all must make our own way in this world. If you can’t be more useful, nature will take its course. Your suffering is not the Barons’ problem. 

As a young man, Valjean stole bread to feed his sister’s children. Jeanne and her husband could not find any jobs that fit their skill set, and Valjean’s random pay for hard labor couldn’t keep all of them alive. He was caught, subjected to the typical ritual of public shaming in the stocks, and, after a majority vote, was sentenced to banishment: Either by taking his chances above or by medical elimination.

And so he ran. In a rush of adrenaline, he shrugged off the guards escorting him to the Elevator and sped off into the darkness, directionless, following twisting tunnels and making random turns until at least he saw some light: a single candle illuminating a sign that said simply ✝️🥖🛏.

* * *

So Valjean is three times a thief: first the bread, then the copper cutlery (later gifted him by the Bishop, but the law might not see it that way), then the coin from the child. This was all many years ago; since then he’s forged a new identity as the businessman and mayor Madeleine. He thought he’d left his past behind him for good, but then there was the business with Fauchelevent and the nurse Fantine and her child and Champmathieu, and the town constable, Javert, who was inextricably tied up in it all. If not for that obnoxiously upright, thorough, and incorruptible policeman, there might have been a way out of this without hurting anyone. But Javert, Valjean has learned, is going nowhere. 

Thinking of Fantine causes something in Valjean’s chest to twinge. She was one of the most incredible people Madeleine had ever encountered, nearly on par with Myriel. It was Fantine who introduced him, seven years ago, to the network of nurses and surface guides and activists who helped banished people make their way to a Surface settlement called Luxium and faked death certificates when necessary. She had treated Fauchelevent’s injury and worked with Valjean to make sure the old man wouldn’t be released to fend for himself Above, even though he had, on paper, outlived his usefulness to society. After the incident with the cart, Fauchelevent had placed complete trust in the man he knew as Madeleine, so although he was hesitant about Fantine’s plan, he gave in after reassurance from the mayor. 

The unfortunate thing, which Valjean ruminates upon in his sadder moments, is that he has no way of verifying any of this. The surface guide he and Fantine met with could have taken Fauchelevent above and left him for dead, or killed him himself, or sold him to somebody. The settlement the nurses spoke of could be a myth — none of them had seen it with their own eyes, after all — or could no longer exist. But Fauchelevent’s only alternatives were certain death, so Valjean tries to soothe himself by remembering that this was the best option they had.

He and Fantine had worked together to rescue — or so they hoped — dozens of people in the years since, but everything came to an abrupt halt when she got pregnant.

Nurses are not supposed to have children. They are not supposed to mate. They are not supposed to interact with society at all, aside from the patients they treat and the other nurses. The clinic is the most dreaded place in the Subterrane: it is the antechamber to Hell, or, in other words, the Surface. The injured, the ill, and the criminal walk through the clinic’s doors; only a few emerge again, and those people are avoided like the plague. They are society’s outcasts: possibly contagious, definitely bad luck. Most people who enter the clinic disappear into that mechanism known as the Elevator, which no one outside the clinic has ever seen but every citizen dreads. 

And nurses, as the keepers of this space, are even more taboo than the patients. They are unclean, infected, a terrifying specter. 

“Madeleine” had been eccentric but tolerated since the moment he set foot in Abyssal Overlook, and the ordeal with Fantine proved itself just another extension of that. It was Javert, visiting the clinic for a routine paperwork check, who noticed that Fantine was showing and brought the issue before the Barons. The idea of a nurse having relations with a citizen filled them — and all the townspeople — with repulsion. The concern was that Fantine was carrying on an affair with a local man, perhaps seducing and manipulating him, and either way risking an outbreak of disease in the town. And, of course, nurses are not allowed families, and no child born of a nurse could possibly be accepted in the community. 

The hunt for the supposedly bewitched man lasted only a few hours before Valjean appeared before the Barons, confessing to sins he did not commit. 

Javert, who had always been deferential and at times even reverential toward Madeleine, gave the mayor a complicated, piercing look as he stammered about his invented love affair. It haunted him for weeks afterward, and he still sometimes dreamed of the moment — suddenly his mouth would feel full of cotton, and his heart would flutter anxiously, and the Barons would disappear and there would only be the constable there, giving him that look. There was so much contained in Javert’s gaze — astonishment, disappointment, disbelief, disgust, confusion, but also …. Was that _hurt_? And did the constable look almost _impressed_? — that it became utterly indecipherable. 


End file.
